Then I lay chained by the foot to the metal, wishing I could be close enough to touch Lilly (but we don’t get to pick where we sleep). It was a night when I’d been talking about something and when I stopped I realized nobody else was awake. The snores Abe made were the way a knife scratches words into wood, incessant. I started to think, “What would it be like to hear only your own breath?”
I shook him up. “Hey, Abe. I’m gonna do it.”
“Do what? Come on, Pete, let a man catch some rest when rest is available to him. It ain’t always, you know—”
“I’m gonna leave.”
He sat up with his eyes half-squinted but a tired smile also. “You are? Well that’s great, Pete, that’s really—”
“But I don’t know how to get the chain off.”
He stared at the chain through the dark. “How important is a foot to you?”
“What?”
“No, never mind, we got nothing’ to cut it off with.”
“I’m not lookin’ to lose my shit here, Abe—”
“You might,” Abe said. “You might.” He lay back down and less than a dozen seconds later, the sound of wood carvings. Soon I went to sleep too.
In the streets I’d stay close in front of the big dog because we were underdressed for the morning’s cold and the steam he’d breathe out would warm you like an exhaust pipe. If the conversations we had at night were xylophones we spent the slow evening sealing them in body bags and woke automatically and without speech. It often happened that someone we passed would spit or shove one of us off-balance and I remember the time that Dante tried to push back.
Dante had a habit of holding his head up and looking not at the things in front of him but the things above that. He said the sky was filled with penguins and icebergs and sometimes it could have other things in it. If we had the prolonged privacy to talk he’d describe them. A herd of black elephants impaling the sun with tusks as clean as baby teeth, the sun like a deflating balloon with grapefruits coughed out in the deflation. He said the sky is much more beautiful like this, covered in pulp and water, and that the elephants were happy. “The problem with my head is I can’t see it myself. My eyes point the other direction, so I make the sky my head.”
He was on the sidewalk, floating in this sky-headed space, when a man passing pushed him down, shouting, “If I have to see a chalko in my own damn city his eyes better be hidden.”
Dante sprang back to his feet, taking two steps backwards like a VCR rewound and grabbed the man by the collar, throwing him down harder. He got on top of him deliberately like a jockey mounts a horse and started hitting him over and over in the face. The dogs immediately upon him and the man’s screams like fire truck alarms until his jaw dislocated, and then they sounded like sleep talk. The dogs exposing the bone in Dante’s body. Nothing could stop him until the man’s face was pressed flat like a rotten pomegranate and the skull stuck out in the shape of a starfish. Then it was easier for the dogs to stop him and they didn’t leave him alone until Dante’s face looked the same.
None of us stopped walking that day, none of us stop walking now. I saw two lovers holding each other’s hands stiffly, in a way that says It could be anybody else’s hand I’m holding. The city ended in a disjointed and confused way, like it had never been finished. Scabs of asphalt over marsh with automobiles half-sunk into it from drivers who stopped paying attention to the road as it came apart. And beyond the marsh that covered our shoes, we came to the field beside an old barn nobody used anymore, where we were supposed to pull all the weeds.
Over miles; every weed; our hands started to get raw. We were used to this and our hands got tough, but sometimes even the calluses broke. This was one of those jobs.
“I’m so tired, Pete,” Lilly said. My hands were cracked so every weed I touched got tinted with the darkness of my blood, but I didn’t mind. It was one of those rare jobs where we could wander, and naturally I wandered beside her. I only nodded.
“Some have the luxury of sleep in response to the body’s asking. But we have to neglect that. We have to neglect a lot.”
“I know,” I said.
“Do you want to run away?”
“Run away? Forever?”
She looked around, and I could tell she was biting her cheeks inside her mouth. She had a way of doing that. The big dog was on his haunches in front of the barn, and the two little dogs that had also come were like trees dotting a faraway hillside, near-imaginary and immobile. Nothing saw us. “Maybe they wouldn’t notice if we just left to have a rest.”
We left and as soon as we broke the line of vision leading to us we started laughing. That excitement of knowing you’re doing something wrong and will suffer for it. She held my hand and it was soft, a loose grip that didn’t let go and said I do this because Why refrain. I turned and said “I love you” and she said “You know I do too.”
When we got to a small pond she turned around and took her shirt off. I reached out to touch her breasts and run my fingers down her stomach and everything was soft. She put her arms around me and the weight of them, that I could feel her and know she was there, was like an anesthesia; in it I forgot all seconds leading to that one and thought for the time that we were freed. I pressed into her, trying to feel all the weight I could.
She kissed me. I kept kissing back. It was the first time and her lips were like fresh plums and I imagined eating one without teeth or closing my jaw. She led me into the water, which was cold at first, but we warmed and everything was bliss. We were naked pressing our bodies together. We might have made love if we had the time. To me I wanted nothing more. But soon the dogs came to find us.
When we were still undisturbed she said, “Pete let’s drown, because down there we can be together forever.” I didn’t know she thought things like that. Now that I’ve left her I love her even more.
“Because none of you work hard enough we need other things to get by,” the master said, walking a circle around us. Our stomachs were filled with those gaseous sighs that come when you haven’t had breakfast to ease you out of drowsiness but we could ignore them. We were all naked and standing against the brick wall of an abandoned schoolhouse, the lines of hopscotch courts still faint and you could see the chalkboards through the windows with lessons never erased. There were train tracks with brambles full-grown between the planks and Abe once said If you followed those trains to the end I believe you’d roll right down God’s throat and live in the bathroom of His stomach until death, when you’d wake up in His hand. It could be.
The master touched each one of our ribs like they were a staircase for his fingers and tried to trip us to see who could keep their balance. The ones who fell were shot in the back of the head before standing. “We need fewer mouths to feed and more humans to sell.” I could smell the gray matter like sushi on the ground or imagined I could. So when he shook me I stayed standing, smelling it. “God, you’re thin. How can you be any good to me so thin like that?”
“Master, I’m determined to serve you; because I want you to eat well so you’re not as thin as me.”
And his expression stayed the same so I relaxed. But when he reached Lilly his hands went to her breasts and wouldn’t let go, squeezing them like they were unliving. He had this smile I still see sometimes when I’m sleeping and Lilly’s face down like someone at a funeral looking into the casket.
“I don’t think I ever seen you exposed like this, missy,” he said. “You look better than I thought you would, with all the dirt and sweat of the fields spread over you. But no, you ain’t a rabid animal now, huh? Tell you what.” He grabbed her wrist and flung her forward and she hit the ground soundlessly. “We’ll make a baby with you.”
When he turned to choose one of us I thought Please be me Please be me Please be me though regretted myself when I looked at her, limp and submissive on the concrete.
Instead he chose Emroy, who could work as long as he wanted and I don’t even think he needed to sleep when it was ti
me to.
One night, after the candle went down and suffocated until lightless, they made love. Though I can only think of it as sex, sex, sex, sex, because Lilly should only make love to me. Even if we haven’t. You heard the sheets rustling and breath that might have been words whispered. Then kisses only coming from one mouth and her saying, “Don’t.” The kisses stopped, and the rustling paused, then it resumed metronomic. I listened to this because I couldn’t go away. A lot of moaning from him and from her only shallow gasps.
The next day when we were working he said to me, “She was beautiful” and I couldn’t say anything back.
This happened a few more times between them and then they understood that Lilly wasn’t going to get pregnant. Emroy made love to someone else and soon became a father.
There’s more I remember about her. But it’s weird the way love is because it can inflate by itself. All the words we exchanged you could write in pen on your skin and still have room for more words; that was the nature of things. I spoke to her at night and thought of her in the mornings. When we were awake they’d rather we do neither.
Many days passed doing different things; I almost forgot. It happened one night when the man was downstairs locking us into the beds. I was lying there, waiting like I always do, looking at the ceiling as he took my leg in his hands and touched me with the cuff but hadn’t yet clasped it. I jerked and kicked him, hard enough to put him on the floor, and he looked up at me. He had this funny way of changing his face then, as if I’d made him happier. I jumped on him dragging the blanket because I knew I couldn’t let him talk, and wrapped his head like it was an egg I didn’t want to break. He was shouting but the shouts got soaked into the cloth and stayed there. Then I slid my hand to where his mouth would be and kept pressure on it, on it, on it, until there were no more vibrations.
I stood up suddenly and felt ice cubes smooth down my back. “What do I do now? What do I do now?”
Lilly started to cry. “You’re a murderer, Pete.”
Mark leaned back on the bed and put his own chain on. “I was already locked in. Okay? I was already here.”
Abe stood over the body now lifeless, watching as if expecting it’ll jerk. He kept looking up at me, opening his mouth and muttering one syllable then shutting it. Shaking his head a lot. “Well we can’t stand here forever.”
“I thought it’d help, Abe, I thought it’d help me leave—”
“Well sure. It does. What’re you gonna do now?”
I walked a circle around the body. “Can you hide me somewhere?”
Abe nodded. They put me under the beds tucked back against the walls so I could hear all night the creaking when they turned. Then Abe broke the glass in one of the windows and ran upstairs to tell them that I’d fled. I listened as they came down to see the body. The men we never see save for times like this. They shouted at nobody and struck Abe over and over and I almost crawled out to stop them, but I didn’t. I listened. I never slept.
And the next day I was free. I crawled out of the window already broken and ran, pumped with the adrenaline of unable-to-sleep. I reached a valley of amateur gravestones, made out of rotted wood or cardboard or less, when the immensity of what I was doing hit me. Every morning I’d woken up to the same violent alarm, walked among the same dreary faces and fell asleep to the same kneejerk conversations, but now I could wake up when the eyes un-lidded themselves. I could be like a kid again, listening to the geese.
There was nobody here. I thought of Lilly. It felt like she was a drain plug you pulled out of a bathtub, and the cold air lowering itself on top of you. Something suddenly gone, irretrievably gone. I don’t think of it now. But I remember how long my heart felt like a draining bathtub I couldn’t plug to stop from draining and I carried it around like you’d carry a dislocated shoulder, just trying to keep it undisturbed.
Miles far away, sleep held me. I must have still been on my feet because I don’t remember lying down but it was mid-afternoon once and then the sun had not yet risen.
I woke to moans that sounded like low-pitched on sped-up tape, so the high of them was unnatural. Beside my head was a nest of hippopotamus babies I could fit in my hand. The trees beeped like heart monitors. The clouds were made of steel wool and kept dipping like fish lines. For my hunger (because my mouth had been denied the usual wheat in boiled water, today) I grabbed one of the hippos and made him brainless under a rock, but then felt too strange to eat him raw.
“No!” said a voice. “No! How could you?” A man with goat horns (maybe falsely-attached to his head) came out from between trees.
“Are you talking about this?” I said, holding up the hippo with the pulped head. The ones below, still in the nest, started to squeal unbearably loud. The clouds as if noticing this scratched themselves across the blue-stained glass of the sky and you could see where it left marks, transparent outwards to galaxies.
“Yes, that! They haven’t even grown yet.” He clenched his teeth. “The tears their mother will make. Give him to me.”
He took the limp thing in his hands (it looked more like a toy), and dabbed at the guts spilled on the rock with his fingertips. His hand glistened when he held it up. “Don’t eat anything. It’s okay, you didn’t understand. I understand everything; I even know why you’re here and I understand that. I was waiting for you to wake up.” He got to his feet. “Excuse me.”
I sat there listening to the hippos still squealing. Soon he came back to put the fixed hippo in the nest with the others and all their moans got softer as they started nuzzling each other. “You’re very lucky,” he said. “Their mother is alone by the water, now, but if she had returned before I did you would have been dead.”
I nodded. “You know why I’m here?”
“You ran away from enslavement. I understand. Feel your cheeks.” I did, and the corks inside them were gone, and a strange tissue that felt like earthworms was there instead. “There’s more to do, of course. Smooth out those scars, adjust your features. I bet your masters hardly recognized you before; they definitely won’t now.”
My head felt like a filled aquarium, heavy and often unbalanced by things drifting from one side to the other; I could feel it tilting on the neck. I stared down at the reborn hippo. His head was unblemished. “I never thought to disguise myself.”
“You would have been recaptured in a day. You slaves are made to be recognizable. But I understand you.”
“I want to go back and free the rest.”
“You never will.”
He made us a breakfast of this stuff that looked like scrambled eggs, but was white and tasteless. Still, it fell into my stomach like other things do. I asked him what he was and he said “Free” and laughed. Then apologized.
“Shall we take care of the rest?” he asked.
Through the trees still beeping and beyond two coops filled with different permutations of chickens (one kind featherless, the other inside-out who wore their organs like necklaces), we came to a house he built out of cinder blocks. The windows were duct taped like the ones in my slave-home and I shivered involuntarily. “Why do you do this?”
“To keep the world out when I don’t want it. Go in, go in.”
I got on my back on a natural-made mattress stuffed with wilderness things. “This will hurt,” he said, “this first part. But you have to be awake to receive the pigment. What color do you want your eyes to be?”
I chose red, weightless red, because I always loved sunsets when I had the chance to see them. I wanted the sun to be setting forever in my eyes if it could. He put the syringe in and pushed the dropper, and I closed my eyes tight to ignore the sting but it just made me blink over the needle. It hurt more. And when it was done and the minutes of dimmed vision ended I looked in a mirror, and it looked nothing like a sunset.
“I’m going to put you to sleep now. Tomorrow, I will teach you about society.”
Then the anesthesia, or something that made me sleep when I inhaled it. When I looked in
the mirror upon waking I felt unrecognizable, though I’d never had much of a sense of what I looked like to begin with; we hardly saw reflections where I came from.
But I no longer looked like a slave.
He brought me to a boiling pot as big as a lake with swollen seals floating in it and lobsters the color of blood blisters thumping the shore. The steam coming off it like the steam from dishwasher detergent that felt un-breathable but so thick between us we looked like smudged lead to each other. There were telephone poles driven into the bottom of it that rose two feet above the water and if you put plywood across them they might have been a bridge. He asked me to cross.
“I don’t think I can,” I said.
He grabbed both my hands and put them underneath the water where they burned, and when he let them up again my fingernails were coming loose. “You may be asked to do things that you don’t expect you can do. But your legs work, your feet are tied to them tightly at the ankles, and it is broad daylight. Nothing prevents you from doing this.”
I looked at the telephone poles like broken pieces of a dock and pretended they were nothing else. But the first one I jumped on paralyzed me, I couldn’t go forward or back, and soon I couldn’t stand still either and the water burnt me again.
“Time is also something you may be asked to relinquish. You know this about time already, that often the time you have belongs to somebody else. You should be thinking how to pickpocket its owners, not how to protect your own pasture of it, which the locusts will eat whether you are watching or not.”
I tried to run like a deer from footsteps or the glimpse of something’s movement, that blind kind of run with all nerves of your body in collaboration towards one idea, but that was also wrong. I fell three jumps in and hit my chest against a pole. My breath got knocked out and it was a longer swim back. On the shore, I rolled in anguish, my skin hyper-sensitive to the grains of sand impressing it. He squeezed my arm so there was a handprint in white within the hot pink. “And they will kick you when you’re down. You know so little; I’m trying to protect you, to make you un-hurtable. Smarter.”
The Deadheart Shelters Page 2